Cloudyn Weekly Digest

So what are the stories that rocked the cloud in the past week? Here’s The Cloudyn summary.

Michael Dell keynote at Dell World: “Disrupt the status quo, democratize technology”Michael Dell is a huge champion of entrepreneurship. And as an Entrepreneur, Dell took a risk that was based on his gut feeling. We all wanted to hear what Michael Dell had to say about taking the company private last month and becoming, as he likes to call it, “the world’s biggest startup.” Dell stated that the company’s #1 goal is to “solve IT the way we solved PCs”.

The company has its sights set on cloud and hopes a new lineup of major partners will make it a one-stop shop for all cloud software and services. Dell’s latest strategic partnerships with cloud and cloud-based application providers, disclosed at Dell World 2013 this week, include deals with Microsoft, Dropbox, Google, Red Hat Inc. and CenturyLink. Now, Dell must rely on a combination of its own software intellectual property (IP) and partnerships to move its business forward, and to become a cloud service broker, and act as an intermediary between the purchaser of a cloud computing service and the sellers of that service, and provide the customer with additional services.

Google Attacks Amazon with Cloud Storage PricesThe highlight of Google’s coming-out party for Compute Engine’s general availability was the pricing on its virtual servers and storage. Google offers a 60% cut in block-storage pricing as a move intended to unseat Amazon’s dominance in cloud the infrastructure, making GCE cheaper than Amazon’s Elastic Block Store. It made up for that big cut by leaving prices on its long term storage — the equivalent of Amazon’s S3 — a little higher. But why cut the elastic block store? Seems that Google believes that Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage is the Achilles’ heel of the market leader. It looks like GCE is giving AWS a run for its money in a few key respects including per minute pricing, pre-warmed load balancing, live migration of virtual machines between regions and improved block storage.DevOps, who are constantly looking for the lowest-cost infrastructure are sure to take notice to these changes. The result of Google’s cuts are aiming for competitive lineup in cloud services.

Why Amazon won’t break a sweat about Google’s cloud yetWhen Google took the wrapper off its Amazon-like Compute Engine service last week, some investors in rival cloud companies – including Amazon – panicked. Shares in Amazon fell as those investors feared that Google would translate its dominance of internet search and ads to cloud hosting. But, it could well be that Amazon isn’t the one likely to feel the heat – at least not any time soon. Currently, we’re looking at a battle for the number two, and it’s a battle that’ll be waged between Google and Microsoft, based on the customers they can leverage and their level of drive and determination. OpenStack, Rackspace and those pitching the “open cloud” are in a different race. Until a couple of weeks ago, the battle for the business cloud appeared to be a comfortable two-way fight between Amazon and Microsoft, with the former enjoying a huge lead on customers and features, while the latter kept launching new features and price packages to catch up. Amazon would respond with more new features and lower prices. Now Google opens up a new front for Amazon. You’re unlikely to see Amazon flinch, not yet at least. Not until Microsoft and Google have finished punching each other up.

Amazon WorkSpaces VS. VDI: Anything Really New?Our weekly blog post focuses on choosing to use AWS, the Battle of the clouds an in depth comparison between Amazon WorkSpaces and VDI, with regards to pricing, security, availability, networking and more.